Date and time: Tuesday 29th of October 2019, 7pm

Location: Karel Doormanhof 45, 3012 GC Rotterdam

Lisa Robertson is a poet and art writer. Born in Toronto, raised into writing by her feminist peers in Vancouver, resident now of rural France, her most recent publications are Proverbs of a She-Dandy (Belkin Gallery, 2018) and Thresholds: A Prosody of Citizenship (Bookworks, 2019)

The Baudelaire Fractal – This is the title of Lisa Robertson’s just-completed novel, which will be published by Coach House Books in January 2020. Robertson will read an excerpt from this story, in which a poet, Hazel Brown, of middle age and mild accomplishment, awakes one morning in a hotel room in Vancouver to discover that she has written the complete works of Baudelaire. Yet she never has been Baudelaire, not will she ever become him. The hotel room is the mysterious portal to this authorship, and so she meanders through the many hotel rooms of her life, considering fashion and sex in the 1980s, painting in the 1840s, perfume in the 1990s, the humiliation of domestic labour, and the good luck of having become a reader as an act of escape from both class and gender.